Especially the big-city crickets. “You know,” Brooks explained, “it hands me a laugh when the critics come out with their Ten Best lists at the end of the year. The New York critics more than the others. Jesus! There are always six films no one has ever heard of. It has so little relationship to moviegoing taste in the rest of the country.”
Even so, he admitted, he longed for one “good review” from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. (Kael had written, in her High Anxiety notice, that “Mel Brooks grabs us by the lapels and screams into our faces, ‘Laugh! It’s funny!’ The open secret of his comedy is that his material isn’t necessarily funny—it’s being grabbed by the lapels that makes us laugh.”) Regardless, flattery from Kael, he told one interviewer, “wouldn’t matter to the movie any more than a good review from my brother Bernie, who’s just as tough a critic.”
Tickets sold, and High Anxiety rose to number six at the box office, staying in the top fifty for the first half of 1978. Throughout the United States, however, the film proved to be “a nonperformer in the second quarter” of its release, in Variety’s words, tapping out at $31 million gross. Again, overseas revenue boosted the numbers, but the aggregate fell below that of Silent Movie, which itself ranked below Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles.
The faint air of disappointment surrounding High Anxiety was reinforced by its disappointing awards season. Brooks had hoped that his title song might be Oscar nominated, but no. Both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild passed over the script. Brooks was devastated. “He was as low as I’ve ever known him,” Anne Bancroft told Kenneth Tynan. A page had turned: Silent Movie was the last Brooks script to be nominated for an award by the membership of either organization.
What made things worse was that 1977 was the year of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, the kind of semiautobiographical comedy that had once been Brooks’s ambition to make. The romantic comedy collected four Oscars, including for Best Actress (Diane Keaton) Best Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen)—a collaboration between Allen and Marshall Brickman—Best Picture, and Best Directing. (The film was nominated in five categories, with its only loss Allen’s nomination as Best Actor.) Although Allen, Brooks’s obvious Club Caesar rival for king of comedy in the 1970s, rarely enjoyed box-office hits, Annie Hall ultimately surpassed High Anxiety in worldwide ticket sales, too.
Perhaps the dip in figures was only momentary. Fans and exhibitors were still fervent. Theater owners ranked Brooks among the top ten box-office attractions in the annual Quigley polls of 1976 (number five) and 1977 (number seven). The National Association of Theatre Owners named him Director of the Year in 1977. Brooks was proud of those achievements, which rebuked the “crickets” and reinforced his idea of himself as a populist artist.
One unabashed fan of High Anxiety was Alfred Hitchcock. The master of the suspense métier sent Brooks a case of Château Haut-Brion 1961, timed to arrive shortly after the Oscar and Guild nominations were announced, with no nominations for Brooks. Brooks and Anne Bancroft were conspicuous mourners at Hitchcock’s funeral one sunny day in May 1980.
After keeping an intense promotional schedule for High Anxiety, Brooks and Bancroft embarked on a three-week Caribbean idyll in February 1978, stopping in Miami, as Brooks frequently did to visit “my little Jewish mother.” In the Caribbean the couple swam, took long walks, and socialized with Alan and Arlene Alda. Alone, Brooks surf fished, wearing a plantation hat, one day on the beach bumping into playwright Arthur Miller.
The couple recharged their batteries. Behind the scenes, there was going to be a changing of the guard among the Club Brooks writers. Brooks had to reverse the downward trends and recapture the magic of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.
The project Brooks talked about most often was “Bombs Away,” which he described to interviewers as a parody of World War II movies reuniting the three sillies of Silent Movie—himself, Dom DeLuise, and Marty Feldman—as aviators bumbling into heroism. But that travesty of Brooks’s own wartime adventures was never more than talk and never got down to a script; with declining box office it seemed at once too personal and ambitious as well as—like Silent Movie—more of the silly and Nice Mel.
Another way to look at it: Was Brooks going to make his next comedy for the “smarties,” as he liked to call them—critics, sophisticates, and intellectuals—or would he make another “potato salad picture” for the great unwashed? He defined the potato salad picture in interviews. “You’re in the deli and there’s this guy with a little piece of potato salad stuck in the corner of his mouth,” he explained, “and he’s talking about your picture to his cronies. He’s saying, all the time with the potato salad hanging, ‘You gotta see this Mel Brooks pitcha, you’ll laugh so hard you’ll pish yourself.’”
During the making of Silent Movie and High Anxiety, which he helped write, Barry Levinson confided his professional ambitions to Brooks. Levinson had a trove of anecdotes about the adventures he and a bunch of friends had shared in their hometown of Baltimore, when they were in their early teens, which he thought might be strung together into an autobiographical script akin to Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni. Brooks loved I Vitelloni, one of his favorite “smarties,” one of the Neorealist films that had inspired him in the 1950s. He encouraged Levinson to pursue his dreams. Levinson was the first member of Club Brooks to say he wouldn’t be back after High Anxiety.
Soon enough, in 1982, Levinson wrote and directed Diner, an I Vitelloni–type memory film based on his solo script, which was Oscar nominated. He went on to craft several pictures about growing up in Baltimore while also directing “smarties” such as Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man from other people’s scripts. He became one of the premier “hyphenates” (film industry slang for a “writer-director”) of his generation, widely admired inside the industry and by critics.
Over the course of time, Levinson and Andrew Bergman stood alone in the category of scenarists who had graduated from Club Brooks to become “hyphenates” with, eventually, their own independent body of work and reputations beyond Brooks’s.
Levinson’s onetime improvisational partner Rudy DeLuca also decamped after High Anxiety. He would write a number of telefilms with occasional big-screen credits, independent of Brooks, over the next decade. He also tried the “hyphenate” route in 1985, directing Transylvania 6–5000, which was a thin comedy, Brooks-like in ways, trading on the public appetite for horror comedies spurred by Young Frankenstein.
Ron Clark never strayed far from Brooks’s circle. He and his wife spent holidays with Brooks and Bancroft; the couples took vacations together and often stopped in Paris, where Clark’s plays were staged on occasion. Yet Clark’s screenwriting tapered off, and he would disappear entirely from the credits of Mel Brooks films for the next decade.
Clark worked quietly behind the scenes on at least one project before he faded away, however. Brooks told interviewers while on his High Anxiety publicity tour that he had been thinking a lot about Preston Sturges, a pioneering “hyphenate” of the 1940s whose witty comedies were the quintessential “smarties,” beloved by critics and fans alike. Brooks loved Sullivan’s Travels, a 1941 picture written and directed by Sturges, that starred Joel McCrea as a successful Hollywood director of escapist farces whose desire to finally do something worthwhile as a filmmaker—make a socially meaningful message drama for a change—leads him to adopt the guise of a bum and go on the road to experience hardships. Remaking classic films was yet another way of feeding off his boyhood enthusiasms, and after High Anxiety Brooks talked with Clark about concocting a story that might serve as his “personal version of Sullivan’s Travels,” according to the Washington Post, “in part because he liked its picaresque format.”
Another god of Golden Age comedy was Ernst Lubitsch, and Brooks considered remaking Lubitsch, too. Partly that came about because of the sequence featuring Brooks and Bancroft, mugging and dancing up a storm, that was among the consensus highlights of Si
lent Movie. The positive reception of that scene revived the temptation to turn some future Mel Brooks film into a joint starring vehicle for husband and wife.
David Lunney, the high school friend of Bancroft who worked at the American Film Institute and socialized with the Brookses, was also a passionate movie buff. With a partner, William Allyn, Lunney had snapped up the remake rights to several golden oldies, including Old Acquaintance, a popular 1943 women’s drama starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, and To Be or Not to Be, from 1942, a Lubitsch classic. The latter starred Jack Benny as the egocentric leader of a thespian troupe in Poland who, after the Nazi invasion and takeover, turns gutsy against Hitler. Carole Lombard played the egocentric’s wife, the troupe’s lead actress, who is just as brave as she is flirty.
Lunney thought To Be or Not to Be would be perfect for Brooks and Bancroft. The actress related to the concept instantly, but Brooks was skeptical. Lunney arranged a screening of the Lubitsch film at the AFI, and afterward Brooks and Bancroft emerged gung-ho.
Lunney wanted to hire a topflight screenwriter who would reimagine the original story by Melchior Lengyel and the scenario by Edwin Justus Mayer, close collaborators with Lubitsch on many pictures. The outside scenarist was okay with Brooks, at least at first, it seemed, because he himself was wary of tackling the Lubitsch remake head-on. The producers therefore approached Robert Towne, an Oscar winner for Chinatown in 1975, who was then one of the most famous names in the profession. Towne was intrigued, but Brooks ultimately felt more comfortable with a newly established playwright, James Kirkwood, Jr., who had won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize the year before for writing the book of the hit musical A Chorus Line on Broadway.
After signing a “pay or play” deal with 20th Century–Fox in 1975 that included the participation of Brooks and Bancroft, Lunney and Allyn commissioned a first-draft script from Kirkwood. However, studio officials were not enthusiastic about the prospect of Brooks switching from his strong suit of audience-friendly spoofs with bad-taste humor to a sophisticated comedy with a hallowed pedigree. And Brooks himself developed cold feet about committing to any script written by a reputable writer outside his usual club, which would have a vastly different tone than his own work and yet have to be honored.
After Kirkwood’s script was delivered, it was shelved. Among those who urged Brooks to write his next comedy alone without collaborators were his wife and Alan U. Schwartz. Brooks’s attorney was rarely quoted on the subject of his client, yet he had strong views. “I’d like to see him doing his own stuff,” Schwartz told Kenneth Tynan. “Give us pure, vintage Brooks, not Brooks riding on the backs of a lot of other people. There’s a strange legal phrase that expresses what I mean. Suppose I’m working as a driver for a guy named Al. If I run someone over in the course of my duties, Al is responsible. But if I take the car to the beach and run someone over, that is called in law a ‘frolic and detour,’ and I’m responsible. I think Mel should go in for more frolics and detours.”
A man who bubbled over with ideas and jokes, Brooks had trouble deciding on an original story of his own that he could flesh out into a film. He needed to have confidence in the story and ample time for the writing. Four years would go by before his next comedy.
While vacationing in the Caribbean, however, Anne Bancroft had arrived at an important decision, which effectively slowed down the momentum on Brooks’s seventh film as writer-director, regardless of the subject. She had just reached another pinnacle in her career, playing an aging prima ballerina locked in a lifelong rivalry with Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point, which was released around the same time as High Anxiety. Her performance earned her her fourth Oscar nomination as Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Bancroft decided that she no longer wanted to be “just an actress.” She wanted to write and direct and hoped to turn one of her AFI projects, Fatso, the short film about a binge eater in an Italian American family, into a feature. Joining the uptick of women in Hollywood who were directing first pictures, who included comedienne Joan Rivers and actress Joan Darling, Bancroft also planned to act a key role in the film. She’d portray the older sister and business partner of Dom DeLuise, who agreed to repeat the character he’d played in the AFI short, the titular fatso trying to lose weight to woo a girl.
Going into his supersalesman mode, Brooks pitched Fatso with his wife at 20th Century–Fox, securing a $3 million budget for the film. His sales pitch: Fatso was going to be a smartie about potato salad. His own staff would serve as a kind of insurance policy for Bancroft’s directing debut: Brooks’s assistant Stuart Cornfeld, who had produced her AFI short, would now produce her debut feature; Jonathan Sanger, the assistant director on High Anxiety, would be the associate producer and production manager of Fatso.
Brooks put his reputation on the line, but not his name, which he did not want to overshadow Bancroft’s. In more ways than one, Bancroft’s decision to direct altered Brooks’s own career path. It would take his wife a year to write the script and prepare the picture, and that was the year Brooks spent developing other properties to be produced under a new company umbrella. The trade papers did not announce Fatso as a Crossbow Production until early 1979. Soon after, Fatso was folded into Brooksfilms Limited, a new entity for California filings and another name change—corporate—for Brooks, a rebranding that allowed him to produce other films without writing, directing, or starring.
If the publicity is to be believed, Bancroft wrote the script alone and “hasn’t asked me for one bit of advice on how to shoot a scene so far,” as Brooks told one columnist.
Yet according to Fatso cinematographer Brianne Murphy, when Bancroft started the production in April 1979, shooting the exteriors in New York, Brooks kept his hand in. Only he and Bancroft, unusually so, were admitted to dailies. Although it was normal for most cinematographers to view the footage, Murphy was barred. “I guess he told her what he liked,” said Murphy. “Word had gotten around that he was very controlling.”
The famous husband’s visits to the set were also out of the ordinary. “Around four or five in the afternoon, Mel would come to pick [Bancroft] up,” Murphy said. “We never knew when he’d arrive and it seemed to be at his convenience rather than hers because whenever he did appear, she’d start wanting to complete a shot.” One day Brooks showed up, “not introduced to anyone and not saying hello to anyone . . . . Mel goes over to the video assist to look at it and in the middle of the shot, he says, ‘Cut, cut, that’s no good, that won’t work, cut it.’” The camera operator, Bob Lamar, a big man, took his eye from the camera, looked down at Mel, and asked, “Who the fuck is that little guy?”
“All hell broke loose,” said Murphy. “Very upset, Anne picked up her stuff and left. It was a wrap. Everybody was proud of Bob for saying what he’d said, telling Mel off for cutting her cut. That’s unheard-of behavior. No one ever says ‘Cut’ except the director.”
The next day, Murphy recalled, a scene was lit and ready to be photographed but Bancroft would not leave her dressing room. After “an hour or so” Murphy knocked on her door. The first-time director told Murphy that she had wept all night. “This is just terrible, what happened yesterday,” Bancroft said, “and I hate to tell you this, but Mel says you have to fire Bob, the operator.” Brooks said the operator was “potentially dangerous,” Bancroft reported. Murphy dug in her heels, insisting that her operator, whom she had worked with for years, was “as potentially dangerous as I was,” and moreover he had bravely protected Bancroft’s rights as a director by objecting to Brooks calling cut.
Bancroft agreed to come out in half an hour, but after two hours of inactivity Murphy returned to her dressing room. Bancroft had spoken to her husband again, with Brooks still insisting that the operator be fired. The director and camerawoman talked it through again, Murphy refusing to fire her operator, who instead, she said, “should get a medal.” Not much filming was done that day. “It was a stand-off,” Murphy recalled. Bancroft went home, she and Brooks had a
battle of the wills all night, the next day the issue was dropped, and “we all got back to work,” Murphy said. Regardless, Bancroft felt defeated.
Chapter 13
1980
Uneasy Lies the Head
Although the original impetus behind the formation of Brooksfilms was Fatso, the new production entity gave the head man something to do with his extra energy, and soon there was a second project, a third, a fourth . . . although the second, The Elephant Man, would loom above them all.
Born in Brooklyn in 1944, Jonathan Sanger first came to Brooks recommended by Barry Levinson, after serving as production manager on difficult locations including William Friedkin’s The Brink’s Job, which had been shot in Boston. Sometime during the filming of High Anxiety, Sanger’s babysitter pleaded with him to read a spec screenplay that had been written by her boyfriend, Christopher De Vore, and his collaborator, Eric Bergren. Their script told the true story of a severely deformed man, suffering from a rare disease known as neurofibromatosis, who lived in London in the late nineteenth century. Named Joseph Merrick, the man was dubbed “The Elephant Man” and publicly exhibited as a freak. The De Vore–Bergren script moved Sanger to tears.
The writers had obtained a low-cost option of anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s nonfiction book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, which was based on a memoir by Dr. Frederick Treves, who’d treated Merrick in London Hospital in his last years. They had ignored—according to them—a successful English stage play treating the same story, which was about to open on Broadway with a title identical to Montagu’s book and their script. (The playwright would later sue Brooksfilms over the title.)
Sanger, who aspired to produce films, paid for an option on the De Vore–Bergren script out of his own pocket and one day left it in the outer office with Brooks’s secretary, whom he knew from The Brink’s Job, asking for her opinion. Brooks prowled his offices like a jungle cat. Not the smallest thing happened without his awareness. Brooks picked up the script, read it over a weekend, and called Sanger in.
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